Close Examination of Fuji X-Series Lag Time

Thanks Easycass for this detailed study. I am happy to see that I was not the only one feeling the lags. I got the XE1 a year and a half ago and I am still hoping that some day Fuji might fix the lag issues. Of course they are doing their best and the minimizing of the EVF lag in the XE2 and the XT1 is a proof of that, but the shutter lag issue was not addressed yet. Since those same shutter lags are still there when you mount a legacy manual lens on the camera, it is quite obvious to me that the origin of the shutter lag lies in the way Fuji built their software.

Although Fuji is extremely good at mechanical and optical design and production I feel that they just tried to reuse the software they have used successfully for many years on their point and shoot cameras. Unfortunately that approach appears to be to restrictive in that it does not allow the exploitation of the full capabilities of the X series hardware.

Here are a couple of lag measurements I just made with the XE1 and an old manual Olympus OM 28mm f/2.8 lens. I mention the lens name just to make it obvious that the XE1 does not have to do any focusing or aperture control here. The ISO is fixed at 200, the speed at 1/30s. So it is a pure manual camera.

I use a USB microphone to capture the sound of the thumb hitting the shutter and then the shutter noise. I run an app that displays the sound on a monitor. Then I freeze the screen and measure the time between the moment my thumb hits the shutter and the time the shutter actually opens. Here is a screen capture of my first test. The lag is 0.3s.

XE1 lag on full press with a manual lens and in manual mode.

In the next test the EVF was magnified (by clicking the wheel).  The lag is longer when hitting the shutter with a magnified EVF.  This occurs often when using a manual lens and it also occurs when using the 55-200 since the 55-200 autofocus needs often to be retouched at least at the long end. The lag is almost doubled here and I feel that a 0.5s lag is way too long.  I would be nice if the engineers at Fuji worked at reducing that lag :-).

XE1 lag on full press when the EVF is magnified with a manual lens and in manual mode.